I am currently offering a funny sort of hospitality to a handful of small guests here at Friendly Hall at Fairlight Farm: I am actively avoiding them. Oh, it’s out of care that I do, not neglect. Our tiny visitors are the various sets of parental birds who have made their nests on the windowsills, wreaths, and doorways of my home.
They are quite welcome, with their twigs and moss and grass and occasional bits of string. We crane our necks to see inside the nests on the ledge on the windowsill above the front door or tucked into the library windowsill at just the wrong angle to see from either inside or out. Did they lay eggs? Have the babies been born? We knew the answer to the latter question with regards to the front door—our dog and cat were suddenly very, very interested in the high-pitched chirps above their heads.
Hosting those avian families on our windowsills is an ancient form of hospitality. We offer them succor in a dangerous world, a covenant of survival. We ask nothing of them in return, not even their companionship. They come to our windowsills for safety. Theirs is a covenant with humanity of the natural world altogether: We, too, can find shelter in the trees and caves, food in the berries and leaves of the meadows. The give and take is neither mutual nor recognized. They, and we, seek the hospitality available when needed, nothing more.
There is a purity in that hospitality that we have lost in our Pinterest world. We hold onto it in moments like this when we welcome a songbird to a windowsill. Do we recognize that covenant today? Do we welcome the uninvited? Even more—do we invite the unwelcome?
Providing hospitality without expectation sounds generous and right to those of us today who wish to show empathy and compassion. We strive to “host” with authentic joy, requiring nothing from our guests. The purity of ancient hospitality covenants begins to crack, perhaps, when we choose our guests, when the welcome becomes too narrow.
In central Maryland, two small churches—one tiny and old and rural and one perhaps growing, a little younger, a “town” church—have chosen to share a priest. It’s an unorthodox mix. And our sometimes-chaotic family of six stumbled right in. Our church has a congregation of less than twenty—on a good day. And our children, now all teens and young adults, are the youngest there by many decades. I do not question the political leanings of our fellow congregants, but there is little mystery in the mix from liberal to quite conservative. Sometimes the divisions seem to align more with musical taste than politics, with opinions on how and when to fix the leaking roof than with voting history. Our sister church has a similar array of opinions, though I’d hazard a guess it skews slightly more liberal along with skewing slightly younger. It is, after all, the town church.
Our church, the smaller, rural one, had, once upon a time, for decades uncounted, hosted an annual church picnic at the nearby farm of one of the founding families of the church, though that had fallen off sometime before the sale away from that family in the late 1980s. When we were told, we hurried to offer our property once again for the church picnic. And of course, our sister church was invited. Invited, too, were the members of the African-American Baptist church in the valley. They had been worshipping with our little Episcopal church for years.
Our annual church picnic is the sort that lives long in memory. The dessert table alone is worthy of song. Recipes are exchanged like currency. The many doors swing open and closed as people circle through the kitchen and dining room for seconds—and thirds. We don’t all know one another, but our stranger-guests quickly become friendship-guests.
You get to know someone over fried chicken and apple cake under the walnut trees at a church picnic. You find out a little more about their family, their job, their hometown. You find out a little bit more about how they think, too. You learn a little about what they find important in the issues of the times, without the obfuscating of political labels.
The conversations happen around the tables at the picnic because the tables are there, because we throw open the doors of Friendly Hall and welcome everyone in. We don’t check for nametags, church affiliation, or political party on the porch. And we all fulfill the covenant of hospitality. We welcome them in, provide the space, the environment for the picnic to happen, drinks and food. Our guests from ours and our sister church bring their gifts of food. We all welcome our joint guests from Mt. Moriah. All of our guests honor us with thank-yous and leftover food, compliments on the house and the goats. Sacred covenant fulfilled.
Last year, we hosted unexpected guests, as well. Before our meal, before the blessing is said and the fellowship begins, we worship. For a time, it’s a sacred space, under the old walnut trees. The peace of nature envelopes us, reminding us of the Creator who set us amid his wonderful creation and bid us care for it. And, as is true of time spent in the natural world, our bodies and minds respond by calming down, relaxing, opening up to connection.
And in the midst of that, came late our guests, first one and then another. Two large and swift black snakes, slithering through the rows of chairs. Black snakes are not venomous. Or aggressive. Those facts, however, are not altogether comforting when you first realize that the rippling strands of grass are moving purposefully, that they are concealing the sinuous 6-foot length of reptilian speed—and unpredictability. Those s-curves don’t travel in a straight line, and the first snake that started by the largest walnut tree to the back right curled its way through most of the chairs before finding its way into the trees to the front left.
We humans have a long and uneasy history with snakes. Very few of us are ever really comfortable with them in close proximity, fewer wish to hold them. They feel alien, utterly unknowable. And those black scales slithering through the grass at our feet were unpredictably foreign and disconcertingly quick. When those of us in the back first realized the waving grass concealed a slithering black reptile, a mild sense of panic started to ripple through the congregation.
A snake or two in the garden is acceptable, not unexpected. You know, in the back of your mind, at least, that when you kneel in your tomato patch you might encounter a snake. That’s their habitat. There, we are something of the interloper.
But this wasn’t the garden. This wasn’t their place. This was a church service on the lawn. Beautiful, sacred, peaceful. No snakes expected—or allowed.
Yet here they were. First one, a moment of calm, then the other. In a sitcom, if the first snake didn’t cause more than uneasy laughter, the drawing up of feet, and a few purses being lifted off the ground, the arrival of the second would certainly lead to outright panic, a few screams, ladies on chairs, perhaps a chase through the crowd. None of that happened here. The uneasy laughter turned to cackles and snickers. Our priest paused in the sermon to laugh about all of God’s creatures being welcome there and that we certainly never expected snakes to join us. And then…we resumed the service.
We, the hosts at Fairlight, had not extended an invitation to two large black snakes. They were not our anticipated guests, nor did we particularly want them there, interrupting our service, making many so uncomfortable, bringing with them certain risks, a little whisper of danger. Yet, older than Fairlight, older even than the time burnished liturgy of our church, are words that ask us to allow them entry. Ancient words of covenant—promise and command. Words across time and culture that speak directly to our souls.
To the ancients, there was no room in that language of covenant and command to first determine the nature of the stranger, to decide if one should extend a welcome or refuse. There was only the stranger at your door and your obligation to bid them welcome. The xenia of ancient Greece, the proto-Indo-European ghos-ti that became the Latin hospes and hostis, the Hebrew ger: welcome the stranger as your guest.
It is from ghos-ti that comes a flood of English words that seem to contradict one another. Words such as hospital, hospice, hospitable, hotel, but also host and…hostile. The cultures in which such words grew understood the contradiction. The guest-stranger was unknown. They could become either friend or enemy, but the duty of care made no distinction.
We can search history to find this replicated from one culture and time to another. One was expected to welcome their guests, to treat them well, to do no harm. In return, their guests would treat them with honor and respect. They would refrain from doing harm to their hosts. From the Scottish Highlands to Rome to Indigenous tribes of North America to the Middle East to Japan to cultures across Africa, sharing a meal, breaking bread, with an enemy meant peace—from a moment only to a permanent peace. One did not invite in an enemy, welcome him to the table, and then contrive to do him harm. The meal, the invitation, the hospitality, was a covenant, an understood promise to honor the human dignity of the other in that moment.
To ghos-ti, stranger-enemy, was added -poti, master or lord—and from those flowed all the words of welcome, the call to be the master of guests, the lord of strangers. It was not a subtle call, nor an empty one. The Romans from whom we have inherited the words, if not the call, understood they were to provide shelter, sustenance, protection, and care for the stranger in their midst. If that stranger was later to become an enemy, the hospitality was no less required.
This obligation, once pragmatic, became, in Greek, xenia, a sacred bond of guest-friendship. Christopher Nolan returned The Odyssey to the cultural forefront recently with a new examination of an ancient tale. In Homer’s epics, not only did the Trojan prince Paris abscond with the wife of King Menelaus, but he also did so after enjoying the King’s hospitality. His affair with Helen was a dishonor to his host and to the gods. Menelaus performed his side of the obligation, hosting Paris as if he might be entertaining Zeus himself. Paris rejected his return duty to do no harm to his host, showing him disrespect instead. And thus, Helen’s became the face that launched a thousand ships among the bickering of affronted gods. We have not retained the Greek words of hospitality, holding onto only the fear and not the welcome in xenophobia.
Biblical hospitality, however, traces the path of welcome obligation and extends it, through the fitting of Greek words onto biblical ideas. The Old Testament, Leviticus 19:34, demanded that the stranger or sojourner, ger, be treated with love and equity: “The stranger who dwells with you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself.” This echoes the obligation of xenia yet does not demand reciprocation. Abraham embraces this legal duty and goes beyond it. He does not merely extend hospitality or welcome, what later rabbinic tradition would call hachnasat orchim, the bringing in of guests, to the three strangers at his tent in Mamre, but in Genesis 18, he goes to them, pursues the offering of hospitality of water, rest, and food without waiting for them to knock.
In the New Testament, Paul names this active pursuit of welcome diōkontes, which finds its Hebrew equivalent in the verb radaph. In Romans 12:13, he calls us to pursue hospitality or philoxenia, to seek out opportunity to welcome others and not waiting for them to come to us. We are to hunt hospitality, like Abraham, moving specifically to host the stranger-guest, the ger.
Philoxenia—not merely caring for the stranger-guest but loving them. Not merely offering shelter from danger but treating them with all care as if they are beloved friends or family and not mere strangers who might yet be an enemy. Philoxenia does not ask that we ascertain their motives before we welcome. Like the Greek covenant it expands, it does not distinguish when presenting us with our obligation. It is not an easy command. It does not sit on the shelf alongside linen napkins and crystal goblets. And more than the Greek xenia, the Biblical duty is borne by the host alone. We are to welcome, to care for, even those who may seek to do us harm.
Can we do that today? Is that not too big of an ask in a world of strangers who can so easily bring danger to our doorstep? Perhaps it is. But perhaps it wasn’t meant to be that way. When the Scriptures moved from Hebrew to Greek to Latin, the words shifted and adapted to capture what we are meant to do. And the Latin gives us the words we use today, but those meanings have shifted through the centuries, as well.
The root hospes was also the word for host and guest interchangeably. As both carried an obligation of respect and honor, the words hospes and hospita were meant for both. They became hospitalis, hospitable—the obligation itself to be welcoming—and hospitium, lodging for this guest-friendship. And history shows us how that was lived.
In the Medieval era, the burden of hospitality was carried by the Church. Monasteries and convents provided rest for weary travels and nursing for the sick. They were the source of beneficence for the poor and shelter for those in need. The Church fulfilled the requirements of hospitality, giving rise to words such as hospital and hospice and hostel.
But with the Reformation came a new emphasis on personal responsibility. As the Protestant Church rose in power and influence, the role of “hospitality” fell to the people of the church, rather than being delegated to the institution. Religious hospitals, orphanages, and charities formed, run largely by volunteers driven by the commands to “pursue hospitality.” They hosted the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the sick, and the poor. Public institutions were largely non-existent, inadequate at best. So, the people took back the duty of hospitality, of xenia, of philoxenia. It was imperfect, as all human endeavors inevitably are. The stranger was too often unfavored in this personal hospitality. The foreigner was someone to suspect, not welcome. Care for the poor fell to the few who were willing.
Yet the virtue of welcome remained. Homes of the wealthy developed unspoken rules of charity—offered at back doors, of course. Women passed on learning about herbs and natural remedies; the sick were cared for at home; and those with a gift for healing shared it within their communities. While one might “host” a party, to be hospitable was still the duty of welcome and succor.
That is not what we see today. We have somehow outsourced the obligation while retaining the aesthetic. We pour over decorating websites and Pinterest, stress about headcount for a party, while the stranger-guest is forgotten in the halls of government buildings and hospitals full of harried caregivers.
Hospitals, caring for the sick and the injured, are most often private, essentially (if not actually) for-profit businesses with insurance companies mediating payments that confound even the most financially savvy. The poor are pawned off on government programs that are more often the rope in the tug of war between political parties in every new election cycle. The stranger, the foreigner is the problem of the State, not the individual, a problem of policy and not hospitality.
Is that philoxenia? Am I commanded to vote for hospitality? Or am I required to live it? Can a government bureaucrat administer welcome? Can a welfare card provide succor in time of need?
I don’t argue against social programs that benefit those in need of aid. But I do question our lack of willingness to offer such aid ourselves. What does it mean to be hospitable as an individual? It means to welcome someone, to provide a “pleasant or sustaining environment.” (Merriam-Webster).
Thirty years ago, I traveled internationally for the first time. I was a recent college graduate who had long dreamed of traveling the world, but I had never imagined Haiti would be my first such adventure. It has been nearly twenty-five years since I last visited Haiti, but I can still feel the heaviness that fell as I exited the plane. It is a hard place to visit, subsumed with what feels like an air of “forgottenness.” Yet in the middle of poverty and violence was a warmth and generosity I have not felt to such a degree since. A stranger, I was made to feel welcome. I was a stranger and I was given sustenance. I was a stranger treated with such care that the warmth of friendship lingers still.
We aren’t asked to demand our government open its borders—and then turn back to social media, to our book club, our family celebration. Romans 12 is a relentless call to do more and to do it personally. We are told to “Bless those who persecute you… Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep… Therefore if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him a drink…” (Romans 12:14-21 NKJV) If Romans 12:13 tells us to pursue hospitality, the verses following tell us what that means. Not what it means for a faceless institution but for me, for us, personally.
Hospitality isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always invitations and the good tablecloth and a glass of wine. It doesn’t just mean our family, friends, or even neighbors or colleagues, though it can. Hospitality means vulnerability. It means risk. It asks us to remember the sacred covenants of the past where the stranger-guest might be either friend or enemy, but either demanded welcome.
We don’t live in the world of long ago and the risks are different today. The reciprocal obligation of the guest no longer holds. Paris stealing Helen away from King Menelaus violated the honor he owed his host. The king expected himself and his household to be free from harm while he entertained the Trojan prince because the law of xenia was absolute. We have no such absolute today.
While my children and I roamed the streets of Washington, D.C. when they were young, we got to know people of all kinds—from the farmers market vendors to the homeless woman at Eastern Market. Very few of them would we invite readily back to our home. We extended our hospitality there on the street or in the market. We welcomed the farmers to our neighborhood, got to the know them by asking questions, invited them to know us in return. The woman on the bench outside of Eastern Market learned our names and we learned hers. We brought her coffee and fruit and chatted with her about her day. Our hospitality was small in material offerings, but it was generous in time and relationship. As was hers.
I didn’t need a Pinterest board or the right set of coffee cups to offer hospitality to my neighbors. I only needed myself. That’s what hospitality asks of us, in the end. It’s not a dinner party or a cozy guest room. Hospitality is the welcome that invites someone. Perhaps it’s an invitation to dinner. Or for coffee at the corner diner. Maybe it’s a cup of coffee passed over a park bench on a cold morning with a genuine, “Good morning!” It might be welcoming someone to stand next to you at the fence at the high school football game and getting to know them, really know them, well enough that you can broach the harder topics like politics and faith and culture.
Or maybe hospitality means inviting to Thanksgiving the brother who voted for someone you find abhorrent. Maybe it means being open to welcoming someone you’ve come to see as an enemy.
Hospitality was never meant to be easy. The pleasant environment into which we welcome the stranger is the one we offer, not the one we create for ourselves. Hospitality means accepting the shared root that leads to hostile as well as host.
I can offer to host a Bible study or a birthday party. And I can offer hospitality to the neighbor who challenges every belief I hold sacred. Both are asked of us. If we take the risk, obey the covenant, we will see the warmth of our small acts of welcome begin to change the world.
Every year, we welcome, gladly, the birds back to our windowsills and eaves. We stop everything to call the family to the window to watch the fox disappearing into the underbrush, family meal in its mouth. We warn everyone to be careful of the bunnies living under the shed next to the driveway. The hospitality we offer is easy. We feel joy in the presence of those living things. We thrill to their beauty in our lives.
Our church picnic comes again in September. We will welcome back our two parishes and the members of Mt. Moriah. We’ll have apple cake (I hope!) and fried chicken and too many pastas to count. The walnut trees will offer shade and the soybeans in the field will shimmer under the morning sunlight. I’d rather our reptilian guests not return. But if they do, they are welcome.
